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Heritage

The hon. Gentleman is quite right. That is the basis of English Heritage’s Inspired campaign for places of worship in use, which is achieving success in underscoring increasing recognition by people that the local parish church or non-conformist chapel is part of their heritage and that they can enjoy and use it even if they do not share the religious faith for which it was built and that primarily sustains it. We deal with buildings that are no longer in regular use where there is an even greater reason for the wider community to make more use of them. I can say that they do so and that it is rewarding to find out what they use them for. The trust’s achievements over the years have been quite remarkable and are almost entirely because of the director and those who have given voluntary help in restoring, maintaining, and getting community use out of buildings that were once purely places of worship. Such buildings are now used for concerts, lectures and ballet schools, and in other ways. One of our buildings is a Quaker meeting house in the Yorkshire dales and is a common place for people to stop when walking the Dales Way so that they can have a moment’s peace and contemplation. That is very much in conformity with its historical tradition. The trust spent £866,000 on a magnificent restoration of St George’s Lutheran church in the east end of London, which I have already mentioned, of which £550,000 came from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a substantial sum came from English Heritage. Again £850,000 has been spent on a small independent chapel, the Salem chapel in East Budleigh, Devon. The Bethesda chapel in Stoke-on-Trent, which is a massive and magnificent non-conformist chapel in the centre of the Potteries, has had £800,000 spent on it during stage one of the restoration, of which £265,000 was lottery funding and £200,000 money from English Heritage. The rest was largely regeneration and Stoke city council funding, which was hugely appreciated locally. Ten architectural awards have been won in the course of our work. Some of the buildings we deal with are in urban locations where regeneration has taken place and some are in remote rural places; some come to us in reasonable order and some are massively difficult to deal with. When HCT was established through a Government initiative and under the chairmanship of Sir Hugh Rossi, it was expected to be funded on a similar basis to the Churches Conservation Trust—about 70 per cent. funding from the DCMS and the rest from other sources. In practice, HCT has raised roughly a third of its funding from English Heritage, a third from Heritage Lottery and a third from its own efforts, which have made up to £6 million so far. We were commended for the amount that we have raised and for what the trust achieves with one part-time director and one full-time seconded member of staff, which is the total staff that administers all of the projects. On the differences between HCT and CCT, the latter has a more secure source of funding in its grant. I understand that its buildings, unlike ours, do not have to be insured because the Government take responsibility for them. However, we pay £25,000 to £30,000 a year in insurance costs. There are problems that are particular to HCT as we have to find match funding and 30 per cent. of our office costs. Any organisation in the heritage field, as it knocks on the doors of trusts and organisations, finds that a certain amount of grant fatigue is setting in. There are many voluntary and charitable funds and applicants in the heritage area and people are beginning to limit the extent to which they can give. The work of restoring buildings and making them available for wider use is hugely rewarding, uplifting and exciting. However, there is a question mark over the future of that work in relation to the funding problems that I have described. I will conclude by mentioning one typical instance of how rewarding it is. One day, we all went into Bethesda chapel in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, which has been empty for 20 years. It was immediately following the appearance of the building on the BBC’s ““Restoration”” programme and the local newspaper photographer came along with his hard hat on and was ready to take some photographs. As soon as he had taken his photographs, he got his mobile phone out, rang his mother and said, ““I am in the chapel. Is this where grandma and granddad got married, where I was christened, and where you told me that you used to go to big events?”” There was a great sense of excitement from a member of the community who was not involved in the denomination—indeed, the denomination left the building around 20 years ago. He felt that this was a building really worth restoring because it was part of his history and life. That is what makes such work rewarding and it is the kind of thing in the heritage area that I want to see us able to continue.